Looking at Fiji and Vienna — Windows Vista has been released for a month now to business, and is going to be released to the general public in a month (January 30). For those who haven't been following Vista's development, it is worh noting that even though Vista comes 5 years after XP, it is a rushed product.

Never mind Vista, here's Fiji and Vienna — Face it, Windows Vista is just so played these days. With that preliminary biz release under its belt, we're ready for bigger and better things, and luckily a certain "jameskyton" drive-by-blogger has the low-down for us on Vista's successors, Fiji and Vienna.

Apple faces suit over iPod-iTunes link — NEW YORK - As if its options woes weren't trouble enough, Apple Computer Inc. said Friday it is facing several federal lawsuits, including one alleging the company created an illegal monopoly by tying iTunes music and video sales to its market-leading iPod portable players.

How VRM can help CRM get past DRM — DRM is a solution to a problem that only appears on the supply side of the market for easily copied entertainment goods. In the absence of a real relationship with customers, the entertainment industry characterize the problem of file copying as "piracy" …

Can Google Come Out to Play? — ON a Thursday afternoon before the holidays, the game room at Google's new offices in Chelsea was being put to good use. Two engineers were taking a break from coding at the pool table. A programmer in a purple Phish T-shirt was practicing juggling.

Unhappy Christmas surprise — sschwebke@standard.net — LAYTON — Christmas became XXX-mas for a 14-year-old Layton boy who discovered hard-core pornography on a video game he received as a gift. — Kolton Mahoney was shocked when he put the Madden NFL 07 game in his new Xbox 360 console Christmas …

A year in Google blogging — The definition of "googol" is a number, and Google lives by numbers. So how else should we look back over the year but with numerical bits? Here goes: This post marks the 294th time this year you're reading a post from us — nearly 100 times more often than in 2005.

Where to get recent MySQL version ? — As you might noticed there are no recent MySQL Community versions available for download from MySQL Download Area This applies both to binaries (which is expected with new polices) but also to the source files which were promised to be available.

The Year the Blog Died — Jeff Simmermon wrote a blog post entitled Drowning Kittens In A River Full Of Cash which he seems to have deleted but which is cached here. There was a sentence from that blog post which stayed with me and I have reproduced below

First Google phone actually Samsung phone — It was touted as Google's first handset, but the Ultra Edition 13.8 is really just a Samsung slider with a bunch of Google apps pre-loaded. — Samsung's HSDPA device incorporates Google's mobile search and Gmail applications.

NEW YORK CITY CABS TO MAP OUT CELL-PHONE DEAD ZONES — NEW YORK — Ever wanted to stuff that "Can you hear me now?" guy into the trunk of your car and take him on a tour of those maddening spots where your cell phone won't work? — One telecommunications company has a plan to do the mechanical equivalent.

Virtual reality to get its own network? — A nonprofit group says it plans to build a network called Neuronet purely to support virtual-reality game and business applications. — Neuronet, which is planned to be separate from the Internet, "will evolve into the world's first public network capable …

at&t's Trojan Horse — SavetheInternet.com calls the at&t "concessions" and the FCC's consequent acquiescence in the at&t/BellSouth merger a "striking victory for Internet freedom advocates". Although this group deserves great credit for getting the Democratic Commissioners of the FCC …